Apple is doomed because we’re no good at math

If you check out the chart here you can see that Apple?s App Store is bringing in the majority of app sales in the industry.

The App Store brings in over $1.7 billion dollars in revenue giving it 82.7% of the markets business. The only drawback of that massive size is that their year over year growth is the lowest of all the others at 131%.

“It’s really sad”, said Brian Moore, author of the piece.” If I had any kind of a clue I’d probably understand that growing a 1.7 billion dollar business by 131% is a good thing - a very good thing indeed. But since I’m a clueless moron and terribly bad at math, it’s just too bad for Apple.”

Paula Pundit ruefully agreed. “It’s just that I’ve been schooled to believe that growth is everything” sighed Paula. “I mean, Google grew by 862% and Apple only grew by 131%.. And 862 is a bigger number than 131, so that’s gotta be bad for Apple, right?”

RIM’s Minister of Math Myths stoutly disagreed. “I think this whole inability to understand math thing is a great, great thing”, he said. “Without it, where would the little guy be? I mean to say, if people actually understood these numbers, out stock would be in the toilet, right? Then what would we do?”

Scarecrow, Professor of Thinkology, agreed. “Look,” he said while shooing a crow from his shoulder, “It’s not that hard to understand - but fortunately, no one understands it anyhow. I mean, if we had to fire everyone who didn’t understand that growing a smaller amount from a larger base could be much, much better than growing a larger amount from a smaller base, then we’d have to fire half the analysts on Wall Street and all the reporters who cover them. And since we can’t do math, how would we know when we’d reached the half-way mark? It would take a Wizard to do that!”

Fortunately, no one is going to be fired. Statistics favorable to Apple will continue to pour in and we’ll just continue to not understand them. It’s just Apple’s dumb bad luck that we’re no good at math. No good at all.

I beg to differ. Our math skills are the bestest in the developed world, second only to our language skills. It’s the proverbial “Law of Large Numbers”, which is why AAPL with $65 billion revenue last year can’t possibly grow at 50% rates anymore. I mean, that would mean nearly $98 billion this year. Pshaw! What a joke. You can expect that of hot startups like Facebook, not old-timers like Apple. Sell all your AAPL shares and get ready for the FB IPO.

It’s interesting how they forgot to highlight that Apple’s App Store revenue is 1747% higher than Google’s Android Market, despite the fact both stores opened within months of each other in the 2nd half of 2008.